Research

My work lies at the intersection of medical, social, and political history, with a focus on Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I am particularly interested in how empire, crisis, and public health intersect in colonial contexts — how epidemic disease, famine, and environmental degradation shaped the lives of ordinary people, and how colonial states leveraged medical authority to manage (and mismanage) civilian populations.

Book Project

Home Front Egypt: Famine, Disease, and Death During the Great War focuses on the period when Egypt was a British protectorate under martial law during World War I (1914–1919). At the onset of the war, General Reginald Wingate declared that Britain’s war with the Ottoman Empire was not Egypt’s war to fight. Despite this pronouncement, the First World War took the form of total war in Egypt: the Anglo-Egyptian administration requisitioned agricultural products to support the hundreds of thousands of British and Dominion troops stationed there for the campaign against the Ottoman Empire, while implementing food distribution policies that proved to be abject failures — neither ensuring adequate supply for the civilian population nor controlling inflation.

Drawing on the administration’s own statistics and price data, I demonstrate that the average Egyptian family was unable to afford sufficient food by the autumn of 1916, two years earlier than previously believed. The food collection system frequently invoked the threat of violence; mismanagement and profiteering enriched overseers and middlemen while leaving little for those who worked the land. The result was widespread malnutrition, traceable through a dramatic increase in epidemic disease — smallpox, typhoid, typhus, and relapsing fever — culminating in the “Spanish” influenza pandemic, which killed nearly two percent of Egypt’s population in the final two months of 1918. Long ignored by modern Egyptian historians, the influenza pandemic disproportionately impacted the peasantry and rural areas.

Home Front Egypt is, at its core, a pre-revolutionary history. I argue that this civilian suffering constitutes one of the underlying causes of dissatisfaction with the British administration that led to the widespread participation of the peasantry (fellahin) in the national uprising of early 1919. The book draws from archival research conducted in Egypt, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the United States, and was supported by a 2022–2023 Fulbright U.S. Scholars grant.

Selected Publications